Suspense Thriller

Young UCSD grad Janice Parrish is jailed for killing the father she loved. When crime reporter Ray Myers tries to prove her innocence, both become the hunted in a mind-twisting pursuit for revenge by a psychopathic killer.

Janice Parrish had plenty reason to hate her father after recalling the horrible memories of the sexual abuse as a child. But even as she's booked on murder charges, she knows there was someone else at his house that night. So begins Janice's dark journey through a tortuous psychological wasteland of false memory and real murder.

In a race against time to save Janice, Myers must stop the stalking psychopath whose murder spree has only begun.

A wartime drama of friendship and betrayal. Set in Vietnam during the decisive Tet offensive, the story takes us on a perilous Heart of Darkness journey through a war we only thought we knew.

The CIA has ordered Specialist Russell Payne to befriend and rat on Corporal Daryll Willingham as part of a secret operation that, no matter how sinister, cannot boost or sustain an unpopular war. The two troops are forced into an unwitting odyssey through hell -- and into a court-martial for murder.

Originally published by Simon & Schuster, 382 pp

Historical Fiction

In 1960 Alabama, Jim Crow laws were strong as ever in a town run by corrupt officials and a powerful, particularly virulent Klan. In this incendiary climate a white doctor tries to save a community of blacks brutalized for decades and now facing a toxic holocaust from the nearby chemical plant.

The determined young doctor pushes bloodily through one physical or emotional encounter into others for a cause grown much bigger than itself and him until, in the end....

Segregation, corruption and hate are the driving forces in The Sum of His Worth, a tragic tale in the voice of an adventurous, sympathetic youth. This is a heartwarming, stunning story running on almost pure adrenaline.

The prize-winning author goes back to his childhood in supremacist Alabama in this “heartbreakingly real” novel of life during the tumultuous Civil Rights era. Working class ninth grader Sonny Poe's big worry is starting high school without a girlfriend when in the midnight woods he witnesses a gruesome lynching. Everything after that changes for him. Traumatized by what he saw and the kindred feelings he has for a black family targeted by the KKK, he latches onto a sympathetic dentist for guidance. Doctor Joe, the title character, is a man with a crusading spirit and a tormented past who will turn Sonny’s and his own mysterious life upside down in this coming of age story of love, betrayal and corruption. The novel, an appropriate companion of To Kill a Mockingbird as well as The Help, is a tension-fueled drama Kirkus Reviews says is "full of nuance … engrossing, profound," a fiction of real events and real lives that can only end in tragedy—and hope.

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"Highly entertaining … An engaging mystery. Argo richly fleshes out his characters, and they show plenty of heart ... Readers will enjoy the huge, unexpected plot twists."

— Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the 2016 Library Journal Indie Ebook Award in Mystery.

A gritty thriller inspired by true events! When crime reporter Ray Myers stumbles upon the massacre of six illegal migrants in the California desert, he discovers evidence they transported babies--babies gone missing.

Driven by his reporter's nose for a good story plus unsolved haunts from a dark past, Myers infiltrates the underworld of human trafficking where he teams up with an unlikely partner in Maggie Frazier, a compassionate member of the misfit smuggling ring that lately has turned on Maggie and wants Myers also to disappear. Things become complex and dangerous for both as their search leads them into a mysterious underground in Mexico for answers.

Tragedy and suspense pursue them both through the seamy streets of Ensenada and into the hands of the ruthless traffickers who think of the precious babies as mere "cargo" for sale to the highest bidder.

"Argo is a convincing writer who knows his material and delivers it with perfection. Baby Love, its blending of plot, character and place, shows he's a top notch composer in the thriller genre. Read it."

Acclaimed as one of the most important novels of Vietnam, Year of the Monkey is the gripping story of two American soldiers at war trapped in a web of corruption and betrayal during the shattering Tet Offensive of 1968.

Journalist Russ Payne's cushy assignment abruptly ends when a wild, tormented grunt named Willingham is reassigned inexplicably to his rear post after an ambush that left everyone else in Willingham's unit dead. Ordered to befriend Willingham as part of a secret CIA investigation into corrupt body-count numbers, Payne begins an unwitting odyssey into the heart of a war-torn jungle where he helplessly watches a childhood friend die, comes to love a woman who's Viet Cong and winds up facing court-martial for murder.

In stunning scenes of combat and intrigue, we glean as in no other novel or movie the patch-quilt nature of the Vietnamese people and the murderous deceit of body count politics from the grunt's eye--on both sides.

Young UCSD grad Janice Parrish is jailed for killing the father she loved. When crime reporter Ray Myers tries to prove her innocence, both become the hunted in a mind-twisting pursuit for revenge by a psychopathic killer. Janice Parrish had plenty reason to hate her father after recalling the horrible memories of the sexual abuse as a child. But even as she's booked on murder charges, she knows there was someone else at his house that night. So begins Janice's dark journey through a tortuous psychological wasteland of false memory and real murder. In a race against time to save Janice, Myers must stop the stalking psychopath whose murder spree has only begun.

PURCHASE NOVELS in hardback, paperback or digital at Amazon, this site, or go to HOTDAMN UNIV PRESS at argostein@cox.net

"Argo writes with style and flair, and his pace never flags. "

— Mark McLaughlin, ForeWord Reviews

Excerpt from The Sum of His Worth

He wasn't a mystery to me anymore. Now I could see who and what he really was. He was strange; he was flawed. But none of that mattered because he had grown way beyond civil concern, way beyond me and even himself. He'd been right about me, I did not matter, nor did we together; he, Doctor Joe, did not matter. It was the cause that moved him, that was him now. He needed to do this more than he needed to love, to live. And that's why he had no fear of the lurking harm ready to wipe him away.

THE COURAGE TO KILL

… a psychological thriller as chilling and suspenseful as SEVEN

A child abused … A father murdered … A killer on the loose.

As Janice Parrish searches the vacuum of a lost childhood, she stands charged for murdering the father she loved. But did she do it?

Crime reporter Ray Myers takes on the sordid story and soon discovers it involves multiple murders, all linked to longago crimes against children. He ends up fighting to save Janice's life as well as his own from a psychopath seeking revenge.